”Next to the door was a giant plastic bucket full of Magic Tools. The geniuses in Milwaukee designed their furniture to be incompatible with ordinary household tools; Orsk products could be assembled only with the proprietary Orsk Magic Tool. The small L-shaped wrench was famously easy to lose, so the store gave them away by the bucketful and employees were required to carry one at all times.”

”During the day, Orsk was a building like any other, a sensible container with modern materials to house furniture and people. But after eleven o’clock, when no one roamed its aisles, when its back offices went dark and the last customers were escorted out the front doors, when its entrances were dead-bolted, when its final floor partners went home, it became something else.”

In many ways, books have a reasonably fixed format. Besides cover design there’s not really much room for diversity beyond the classical framework. Therefore I find it incredibly exciting when writers start experimenting with this format, and one must say that that is what Hendrix have done here!

My expectations to the Horrorstör concept, which I expressed here, were surely met in relation to the design. With the pictures I’ve tried to capture the very thorough style, which includes everything from employment forms to a detailed map of the store (which turned out to be completely essential, if one had the desire to actually follow the story, after the initial, superficial enthusiasm had subsided). Pages and text are arranged as in an IKEA catalog, and the chapters are named with Orsk’s Norwegian furniture titles of products that each have relevance for the following part of the story. I should say that these furniture drawings become increasingly macabre, as the story progresses (eventually it got a bit too Saw-like for my taste). But without doubt one thumb up for a well executed concept!

In Horrorstör we follow Amy, who works as a “store partner” (perky cheat title for an ordinary service employee) at the IKEA knock off chain Orsk. We jump into her daily life and are invited behind the scenes and into the sales techniques and internal, petty position hierarchies. The first third of Horrorstör delivers a satirical, almost tragicomic perspective on the otherwise colorful, welcoming, too-good-to-be-true-service minded LEGO brick of a furniture chain that we know and (I) love.

”Next to the door was a giant plastic bucket full of Magic Tools. The geniuses in Milwaukee designed their furniture to be incompatible with ordinary household tools; Orsk products could be assembled only with the proprietary Orsk Magic Tool. The small L-shaped wrench was famously easy to lose, so the store gave them away by the bucketful and employees were required to carry one at all times.”

Very quickly we learn that something is very wrong, however, in this particular Orsk store. Sofas are smeared in stool and the empty, false homes in the showroom department are smashed every night. Surveillance cameras show nothing, and of course it’s our favorite, pessimistic Amy, who, with a couple of colleagues, gets the job of staying in the showroom to find out what is up. And this is where my curiosity was really piqued! For Grady is quite successful in painting a disturbing picture of the huge, abandoned, twilight showroom floor.

”During the day, Orsk was a building like any other, a sensible container with modern materials to house furniture and people. But after eleven o’clock, when no one roamed its aisles, when its back offices went dark and the last customers were escorted out the front doors, when its entrances were dead-bolted, when its final floor partners went home, it became something else.”

Rather fast we are entering a creepy fun house-ish universe. The falsity of everything around them is suffocating as an infinite dollhouse. Fake wardrobe doors that leads nowhere, fake window views behind the blinds and kitchen plumbing that isn’t connected. As Orsk starts fucking with the employees’ minds and transforms the strictly planned showroom route (the bright path of arrows) into a perpetual maze of hallucinations, I was dying of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, this was where the story peaked for me. With the exception of Basil’s utterance: “I can’t believe this is happening. There’s a dead man on the Frånjk!”, it only goes downhill from here for Horrorstör. And the hill is steep.

As the story progresses, the actual horror plot is finally taking off and the entertaining, disdainful, indirect kicks in the crotch to IKEA fade out steadily. Cause the horror element is unfortunately not in the creepy “furniture chain-after-dark” basis, as the concept so obviously invites to. On the contrary the reader is fobbed off with probably the greatest horror cliché of a backstory I can imagine. Turns out the only eleven months old furniture bomb of a building lies directly above a few hundred years old, torture based prison filled with unfairly convicted wretches and one power-hungry prison manager who still roams the halls of Orsk. The horror element has pretty much nothing to do with Orsk, whatsoever, and isn’t that just a shame? Modern, cheerful retail chain by night was just that reinvented concept I had been looking forward to in this book, and I actually think Grady just lets us have a sniff at it and then makes an abrupt U-turn into frivolous, inadequate stupidity.

I generally like the idea that Horrorstör at first glance honors consumer culture and Scandinavian furniture chains with elegant low-cost solutions, while the text that fills the pages is both entertaining satire and terrifying total-criticism of the same. Sadly this just falls to the ground when it seems that Hendrix has put more effort into being different and ready for the movie screen than he has in writing a coherent horror tale. Also I must say that the big, terrifying main monster is a little sloppy when he lets Amy escape him three or four times during the night. At least Grady is the first to have his own character point out this blatant fail early on: “It’s starting to feel like an episode of Scooby-doo.” No recommendation here.